In recent years, mobile communication terminal apparatuses according to various systems including PHS (Personal Handyphone System), PDC (Personal Digital Cellular Telecommunication System), and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) have become widespread due to their compactness and lightness, improvement in communication quality, and reduction in their prices and in the call charges. Originally, these communication terminal apparatuses were generally for the purpose of voice communications, but recently they are often used for communications via e-mail. In addition, as a way of using communication terminal apparatuses, it is getting more popular to download and display data offered as services from various sites. When a communication terminal apparatus receives a character message such as one included in a received e-mail message, in order to present the character message to the user, the communication terminal apparatus converts character codes to character images that can be visually recognized on the display screen, and displays them on the display screen by aligning them according to the control codes (e.g. line feed codes, tabs, etc.).
This conventional display method, however, has a problem in treating delimiters such as spaces. For example, when an e-mail message is created in a provided format using a personal computer (hereafter, referred to as a “PC”) by which the total number of characters to be displayed on the screen is large, sometimes space characters are shown in sequence, for example, “□□□N□□E□□W□□S” (“□” denoting a space) as in a heading. When this kind of heading is displayed on a display of a communication terminal apparatus in which the total number of characters to be displayed on the screen is only eight per line, the first line reads “□□□N□□E□”, the second line, □W□□S. There is a meaningless line feed in the middle of the heading, and it is difficult to read. Further, in a case of a communication terminal apparatus that has only a limited number of lines on a display, when a lot of line feeds occur like this, the user experiences inconvenience, during operations of the apparatus, that he/she has to scroll the screen frequently. This inconvenient situation is more likely to occur when a message is created with an apparatus such as a PC, by which the total number of characters to be displayed on the screen is large, and is displayed on a mobile communication terminal apparatus in which the total number of characters to be displayed on the screen is small.
It should be noted here that a delimiter character is (i) any one of special characters other than alphanumeric characters, “Kana” (Japanese alphabets), and “Kanji” (Chinese characters in the Japanese language), and (ii) is a generic term for symbolic characters that have functions to delimit (or separate) characters or words. A typical example is a space character. Other examples include special characters shown in the signature portion of an e-mail message (e. g. “−”, “˜”, “*”) and pictorial characters which the user has optionally created or registered.
In view of the aforementioned problem, an object of the present invention is to provide a communication terminal apparatus and a method for displaying characters that make it possible to display on the screen a character message that includes delimiter characters in a sequence, in such a way that the receiver of the message is able to easily read the message without experiencing inconvenience such as having to frequently scroll the display.